NFTs Are Revolutionizing the Culture Scene - TokenSmart NFT Humpday Report #17
Welcome to the 17th issue of the NFT Humpday Report, a weekly column covering and providing embedded analysis on the NFT economy’s biggest topics du jour. Brought to you by WIP meetup collaborators and nft42 community hub TokenSmart.
NFTs first came to the fore in 2017, after which interest acutely wavered amid the wider cryptoeconomy’s 2018-19 bear market. Significant innovation across the NFT ecosystem since then has led to a major new resurgence for “media legos,” with this boom period only having picked up steam since it started around early 2020.
So what’s driving this rapid growth? One big factor here is that via their unprecedented possibilities NFTs can revolutionize the ways we approach cultural projects, and more and more people are starting to take notice of this reality.
Source: “The First Supper,” Async Art
The new cultural stack: In the Web 2.0 era and prior cultural projects were at the mercy of large centralized third parties. In the new Web 3.0 era we’re entering, creators both big and small can create in self-sovereign fashion (NFTs + Ethereum) and use their proceeds in a powerful, open, tamper-resistant alternative financial system (DeFi) that offers them useful and unprecedented services. For this reason, the new Web 3.0 culture stack looks like NFTs + Ethereum + DeFi, and the fruitful possibilities at these crossroads have only just begun.
Generally speaking, we can contrast the Web 2.0 status quo with this new paradigm like so ...
Mainstream platforms are centralized, managed and permissioned by 3rd parties. The platforms are gated from one another, rent-extractive, and not optimal for creators but rather for companies. Innovation is capped by what operators will permit.
NFT + crypto-native avenues are decentralized, permissionless, and managed by communities of users. The infrastructure and platforms are open, durable, global, DIY-centric, self-empowering for creators, and disintermediating for traditionally rent-extractive companies.
Early NFT innovations: In the years ahead, expect to see hundreds of further promising NFT use cases pop up as people take this blank canvas media tech and start increasingly adopting it across all walks of life. Yet it’s also true that the early NFT use cases we’ve seen to date have already revolutionized how people can approach culture. Some of these innovations include:
Automated secondary sale royalties
Programmable art and music
AR art
Tokenized consultation time
Subscription and membership badges
Digital collectibles
Play-to-earn gaming and game assets
NFT-centric social token liquidity mining
NFT mining rewards
NFT-backed real world and VR apparel
Tradable VR avatars
VR real estate and the beginnings of a metaverse
NFT-based fantasy sports leagues
Prediction marketplaces
Decentralized domain names
Shared asset ownership
Why it matters: NFTs pave the way to new kinds of cultural experiences and interactions that builders can create and operate themselves, from start to finish and top to bottom and with no outside permission needed.
This is an extremely liberating dynamic that’s never been possible before in the world, which in the past has been dominated by states and companies. Now NFTs give individuals and communities more cultural power and freedom than ever, so it’s only a matter of time until many more people start to learn about and embrace this empowering tech.
As such, it may be that NFTs go down as one of the defining media innovations of the entire 21st century!
Thanks for reading the 17th NFT Humpday Report! Check back this time next week for more excellent NFT ecosystem coverage! Cheers🌠